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Tom Friedman

Obama’s Syria nightmare

The reason Syria explodes is because its borders are particularly artificial, and all its communities — Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites, Kurds, Druze and Christians — are linked to brethren in nearby countries and are trying to draw them in for help. Also, Sunni-led Saudi Arabia is fighting a proxy war against Shiite-led Iran in Syria and in Bahrain, which is the base of the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet. Bahrain witnessed a host of bombings last week as the Sunni-led Bahraini regime stripped 31 Bahraini Shiite political activists of their citizenship. Meanwhile, someone in Syria decided to start lobbing mortars at Israel. And, Tuesday night, violent anti-government protests broke out across Jordan over gas price increases…

Still, the lesson is that if you’re trying to topple one of these iron-fisted, multisectarian regimes, it really helps to have an outside power that can contain the explosions and mediate a new order. There is too little trust in these societies for them to do it on their own. Syria’s civil war, though, was triggered by predominantly Sunni rebels trying to oust President Bashar al-Assad and his minority Alawite-Shiite regime. There is no outside power willing to fall on the Syrian grenade and midwife a new order. So the fire there rages uncontrolled; refugees are now spilling out, and the Shiite-Sunni venom unleashed by the Syrian conflict is straining relations between these same communities in Iraq, Bahrain, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Kuwait.

The reason Syria explodes is because its borders are particularly artificial, and all its communities — Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites, Kurds, Druze and Christians — are linked to brethren in nearby countries and are trying to draw them in for help

The reason Syria explodes is because its borders are particularly artificial, and all its communities — Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites, Kurds, Druze and Christians — are linked to brethren in nearby countries and are trying to draw them in for help.

Which is exactly why we should do jack squat unless and until we have a clear and direct national interest there. We’re not going to be able to cobble together a country in the aftermath – there are lots of issues that these peoples need to work out between themselves.

I have absolutely no desire to get involved with this mess or frankly any other ME CF from now until the end of time. Let them fight it out. With any luck, it will be a decades long war exhausting both sides Sunni/Shia until all of Islam collapses under the weight of its stupidity.

I have absolutely no desire to get involved with this mess or frankly any other ME CF from now until the end of time. Let them fight it out. With any luck, it will be a decades long war exhausting both sides Sunni/Shia until all of Islam collapses under the weight of its stupidity.

Drillers in Utah and Colorado are poking into a massive shale deposit trying to find a way to unlock oil reserves that are so vast they would swamp OPEC. The amount of oil recoverable is estimated to be 3 trillion barrels – three times more that the whole world has consumed in the past 100 years.

“The Arab Spring is the greatest story I’ve covered. It was about the deepest human things – dignity, justice, and the quest to get the tools and opportunities to realise one’s full potential.”

– Tom Friedman, 11 May 2012

New hotness:

“And for Obama’s second term, I fear that it could be the full nightmare — all of them at once. The whole Middle East erupts in one giant sound and light show of civil wars, states collapsing and refugee dislocations, as the keystone of the entire region — Syria — gets pulled asunder and the disorder spills across the neighborhood.”

Also, note that Friedman manages to gratuitously minimize our current fiscal crisis (“And you were worried about the ‘fiscal cliff.'”). Yet he gives AlQaeda only an inconsequential passing mention (“For Bill Clinton, it was Al Qaeda and Afghanistan.” – as if the AlQaeda era ended after Clinton’s second term) and no mention at all of the Muslim Brotherhood while diagnosing the ills of the world.